This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. -- Charles P. Pierce, "Idiot America," 2009


It's hard to tell when America got to the point where even the seemingly intelligent formulate their opinions in a knee-jerk manner.

We have become a culture that takes soundbites more seriously than expertise or plain commonsense. Unfortunately, this is what cost Shirley Sherrod, the USDA official who tried to explain how she got over her own prejudices and wound up demonized by Breitbart.com publisher Andrew Breitbart (pictured), her job.

But this was never about Sherrod. Just as his blaggard ego dictates, it has all been about Breitbart who has become a master of manipulation. He's really no different than "Iago" from "Othello" or the Emperor from "Star Wars" -- he manipulates just by whispering the right bullsh*t into the right ears.
This whole controversy, as you are no doubt aware of by now, spawned from an edited video which apparently exposed Sherrod's admitting that she had discriminated against a white Georgia farmer. The video surfaced on Breitbart's website and then wound up, of course, on FOX News -- that bastion of truth-and-reason-based conjecture.

Sherrod was forced to resign by the Department of Agriculture. The Obama Administration was scared -- scared of a dude with a website that mainly attracts people who'd have no problem snorting Ronald Reagan's bone dust. Subsequently, NAACP president Benjamin Jealous dissed her like she had the booger touch, because he and his organization had just criticized the Tea Baggers for not distancing themselves from racists within their ranks.

Sherrod didn't keep quiet about the way she was treated and the farmer she supposedly "discriminated" against, Roger Spooner, appeared on CNN with his wife Eloise defending Sherrod, saying that she'd actually helped them to save their farm more than 20 years ago. Whoa! You mean this woman who was described by the NAACP as "racist" actually helped white people? Yep, she even had a reputation when she worked for a rural non-profit for helping farmers stay out of foreclosure.

Before the day was over, the NAACP thankfully posted the whole video, which showed Sherrod telling a story of overcoming her own prejudices. Luckily the comments in question took place at an NAACP Freedom Fund dinner, so the organization had access to the entire speech, much to Breitbart's chagrin. But more on him later.

By morning, the apologies were oozing out of everybody who had been ready to bury Sherrod up to her shoulders and stone her. First Jealous, who said his organization had been "snookered" by the edited video, then Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who was driving the bus Sherrod was thrown under. Vilsack tucked his tail between his legs and offered Sherrod a new USDA job. Then the Obama Administration sent out a "we f*cked up" message, and even FOX commentator Bill O'Reilly, who drools over things like this, offered his apology, since it was on his show the tape first appeared.

But back to Breitbart. Through the 24 hours since this took place, he has failed to acknowledge any responsibility for what has happened. He has blamed the Obama Administration, the Agriculture Department, the rest of the media, the NAACP, and I'm sure the dancers from the "Brand New Day" sequence from "The Wiz." So far, though, he has not manned up and admitted he was wrong.

But apologizing is not Breitbart's modus operandi. Everything that has happened is exactly what he wanted to happen. Guys like him don't actually care about people like Sherrod; she was just collateral damage in his media war. The people he purports to be fighting, the NAACP and President Barack Obama, don't actually matter to him.

What does matter is that he suckers people into falling for his charlatanism. He's had the entire news media involved in this thing, paddling Sherrod like she was a greek pledge during hell week at some remote Southern college. Fact checking, the first thing they teach you in journalism school, was forgotten about, and the USDA and the White House reacted in the knee jerk fashion that our society has become so good at.

Score one for Breitbart. This was his intention. It doesn't matter that the damn tape was edited to look like something it wasn't. He didn't need to check anything. It said what he wanted and that was all he needed. A few hours later, a snickering Breitbart is laughing all the way to the bank at your expense. For as long as he has people acting without thinking, he wins.


People like Breitbart, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and so many more of these right-wing bullshit engineers, thrive on witch hunts like this. The country then becomes a torch-bearing mob, with straw hat, missing-toothed yokels screaming, "Let's have us a hangin'."

There was a time when conservatism meant basically one thing: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. That means that people were supposed to live their lives the way they saw fit and within the boundaries of good taste and other people's rights. It did not underscore a need to legislate morality, to dictate lifestyles or reproductive rights, or basing education on dogma.


But one day, along came Senator Joseph McCarthy, who decided to stage the first postwar witch hunt in which anybody he didn't like was deemed a ravenous communist determined to subvert America. Really, there are people who live in ruination to this day because of that *sshole. That's when conservatism took a turn for the worse.

Conservatives figured they could use accusations to weed out undesirables. It was a great way to wrest political power. All they had to do was create an "us vs. them" atmosphere and make sure "them" were people who would drag the American way of life (which never really existed) in to an immoral den of sin and debauchery. Paranoids like McCarthy cohort Richard Nixon did it. So did Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California, targeting the Black Panthers. If they could make you scared of "them" then they've done their job.


And the fear factor is what Breitbart uses. I mean, damn. You've got a Negro president backed by an organization of educated well-to-do Negroes that have a venerable history in this country. If the right formula can be figured out, then you can blame them all for dragging this country in to economic ruin, even though the Negro president actually stopped us from going to hell in a handbasket.

Breitbart requires hatemongers, those who react out of fear, those who feel that gun laws need to be relaxed so that "real Americans" can protect themselves from dangerous minorities, the people who believe in their own personal freedoms but then think you still need to be monitored constantly, even in your sleep, to read his website. When they do, he gets web traffic, just like here on Black Voices. When he gets the traffic, he makes money and the right wing gets a new spleen to snack on.

It's really that simple. Rupert Murdoch doesn't operate any differently.

Now say we give Breitbart the benefit of the doubt. Say he just made a mistake. Say he slipped up and just forgot to check the whole tape. He still hasn't offered any concession for that at all. Obama was man enough to apologize. Vilsack was man enough to apologize. Jealous was man enough to apologize. Even O'Reilly was man enough to apologize.

Breitbart hasn't apologized, apparently because he's just not man enough.